Featured Artist : Harry Miller

For the past eight years we have been marketing a unique product that has been very well received by our clients and turned out to be a very profitable cottage industry.

For the past nineteen years, I have been making a fairly good living as a professional artist. I specialize in motorcycle artwork. I paint watercolors and pencil portraits of motorcycle racing heroes as well as commissioned portraits.

One day I was sitting in my vending booth at the International Speedway in Daytona Beach, during Bike Week. People were buying my work, which was great, however, they were giving me checks and credit cards which meant I had no cash. No money for food, gas, or motel charges. I was 2600 miles away from home and no way to deposit these checks or charges. I reasoned, how could I get a buck or two from everyone who walks by? I needed something that was cheap, small, and attractive to anyone who walked by. Then it hit me, shop towels. When I returned to Colorado, I got a five gallon plastic bucket, searched out some cotton towels, and  bought a bunch of Rit dye packages. After lots of experimenting, I came up with a viable product. A friend of mine was a long time tie-dyer (and Deadhead). She gave me Dharma's phone number and I have been buying your products for many years now with complete satisfaction. I buy the towels from a textile company in Georgia. The towels come in a 80-kilo bale from Russia. We now have expanded our operation from the plastic bucket to three washers, a dye vat, and two dryers in a production room in the lower floor of my house.

Once the towels have been washed, bleached, dyed, rinsed, and dried, we must stack them. We put a weight on the stack to smooth them out. I then deliver them to our silk screener, who prints them with either one of our 60 standard designs that I have drawn, or the customer's logo or design. Our customers tend to be shops, clubs, and rallies. Our busy season starts in the spring, with the motorcycle dealers buying for the summer. Then the summer is busy with various clubs and rallies getting towels for their "get-togethers." To date, we have sold around 150,000 towels with no end in sight. We have just started to expand our product line into doing aprons and bandanas. We now have several dealer reps. who carry our products to dealerships around the US.